This document relates to optical resonators and devices using optical resonators.
Optical resonators can be configured in various configurations. Examples of well-known optical resonator designs includes Fabry-Perot optical resonators and optical ring resonators. As another example, an optical material such as a dielectric material may be shaped to construct an optical whispering-gallery-mode (“WGM”) resonator which supports one or more resonator modes known as whispering gallery (“WG”) modes. These WG modes represent optical fields confined in an interior region close to the surface of the resonator due to the total internal reflection at the boundary. Microspheres with diameters from few tens of microns to several hundreds of microns have been used to form compact optical WGM resonators. Such spherical resonators include at least a portion of the sphere that comprises the equator of the sphere. The resonator dimension is generally much larger than the wavelength of light so that the optical loss due to the finite curvature of the resonators is small. As a result, a high quality factor, Q, e.g., greater than 109, may be achieved in such resonators. Hence, optical energy, once coupled into a whispering gallery mode, can circulate within the WGM resonator with a long photon life time. Such hi-Q WGM resonators may be used in many optical applications, including optical filtering, optical delay, optical sensing, lasers, and opto-electronic oscillators.